Dear Theophilus, 

I see in your last letter that you raise the question about miracles. We have shied away from this for some time, but maybe it is time to spend a little bit more time on this.

There is an aversion to the idea of miracles within certain circles. It seems that there is something phoney in invoking miracles as if miracles are a way of evading the hard realities of life. But, if we take a hard and objective analysis of what miracles are, then we will see that they do fit in with what we know of creation.

Some theologians, bowing to worship the spirit of the age, have tried to describe a Christianity without miracles but this has been a far from successful attempt. Miracles are at the very heart of Christianity: the Incarnation, the Resurrection are the essence of Christianity. To deny miracles is to eventually deny what Christianity is all about.

An objection raised to miracles, often from the side of scientists, is to say that miracles defy the laws of nature and there is something unreal about miracles. It is almost as if miracles go contrary to what we know of the universe. The reason for this is that miracles have often been painted as a magical manipulation of nature to perform spectacles and to amaze.

To say that miracles contravene the laws of nature is to fudge the picture. Let us say that you have four quarters on your dresser. These four quarters add up to a dollar according to the rules of arithmetic. Let us suppose that you come to your dresser and you have only seventy five cents there. Unknown to you, your mother has come and taken a quarter. Now you could claim that the laws of nature have been violated here. The four quarters that you had do not add up to a dollar. But this does not mean that the rules of arithmetic have been challenged. They still operate but another agent has come into play here and that is your mother. When we see something inexplicable happening it does not mean immediately that laws are being violated. It simply means that our grasp of the situation is incomplete. When you realize that your mother has caused one of the quarters to disappear, the matter is cleared up. If God has the power to act in nature, what is there to say that He cannot, except our bias?

There is a highly instructive incident that takes place very soon after Christ is baptized by John the Baptist. Christ goes into the desert and is tested by Satan. One of the temptations addresses turning stones into bread and the other includes a challenge to leap off a high place and to cause angels to appear and save Christ. Both of these events would be called miraculous by many today, but they are not done so within Christianity because they would not be true miracles but chaotic manipulations of nature for only selfish satisfaction.

In the Gospel of John, Christ says that he does what he sees the Father doing. This is relevant to much of our discussion. If you look at the miracles reported in the New Testament, you will notice that they are in accord with what we see of creation. Water is turned into wine, but this has been going on for thousands of years. Rain falls into the earth, is absorbed by the grape vine which produces grapes and which can be fermented to produce wine. Bread is made from bread in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. The seed of grain is buried and produces other seeds of grain which are ground into flour for making bread. But nowhere in nature do you see bread coming from rocks or stones. Nowhere in nature do you see people defying gravity as they leap off a cliff. These are the tricks of a charlatan and Christ refuses to go along with them. We see, therefore, that the miracles of the New Testament are not so much a violation of nature as an indication of how nature would behave if she were not fallen.

As to the question of the laws of nature it is important to realize that the laws of nature do not do anything. They merely describe, often in a mathematical form, the predictability and faithfulness of nature. They talk about how nature behaves but they say nothing about the one doing a given act. The laws of nature can describe the interrelationships between the various parts of the universe but they cannot tell us why the universe is there at all. In a sense, it false to say that laws do something; they don't.

I think that there is also something very profound and important about the independence of nature. The universe that has been created by God is not some whimsical toy that He manipulates at will. In a sense, God has bound Himself by certain rules and one of these is that there are physical laws that operate and the universe has a certain amount of freedom. It is just this freedom that scientists explore in their investigation of matter and energy and what they have found in their explorations is that the universe is dependable and therefore, to a certain point, predictable. One way of seeing this is that the universe has been given a gift of independence by God. Sometimes, it is forgotten that a gift has been given and the assumption is made that the universe is completely self-sufficient and came into being without any act outside the material universe. Some go so far as to claim that God does not exist. One should not be intimidated by these claims because scientists who make these claims are no closer to disclosing the riddle of existence than a kindergarten pupil. A scientist even with the most outstanding credentials cannot talk about the non-existence of God because this question is really outside the domain of science. But there is something more here. We have said that the universe has a repeatable and predictable behavior and we have summarized this faithfulness of the universe in laws of physics. This raises the question: why is the universe predictable and why can we sort of get a handle on describing it through the language of mathematics? In other words, why do laws of nature exist at all?

Some scientists would say that this is a nonsensical question. Laws exist and that's all that there is to it. This is an evasion because it is legitimate to ask how the universe has taken on the form that it has. Hidden under all this is an assumption underlying all of science, an assumption which has no basis but which has taken on a dogmatic life of its own. The universe must be explainable when it comes to questions of its origin and operation, in terms of the data available from the universe. In other words, what we are saying is that the universe is self-explaining. In support of this what is produced is the testimony of all the successes of science in explaining various phenomena such as the physical origin of the universe, the creation of life and other characteristics of the world that we live in. There is no denying that we have discerned much about the operation of physical reality and the successes have been truly marvellous. But this brings us back to the question raised before. Why are there physical laws at all? And here we run into a wall because we cannot use physical laws to explain the origin of physical laws. This would be akin to lifting yourself up by your shoestrings - you cannot do that. But if we cannot explain the origin of physical laws, we have a big gaping hole in our picture of physical reality.

There is something else that is problematical about a narrow view of the universe. If we take a look at all the operations of the universe, the highest achievement has been the coming into being of personal beings who are aware of themselves and who are aware of the operations of the universe and can study this. One is reminded of a statement by the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal. If I look at the universe I am daunted by its size and majesty and power but I must not forget that the most amazing thing about the universe is not what lies in front of me but what lies behind the eyes that are observing the majesty of the universe - me, a personal being. Scientists, in their pursuit of the Grail of total knowledge give short shrift to the personal seeing it as a characteristic secondary importance. Here, people who hold on to this view are betraying their philosophical heritage which happens to be not modern and advanced but the philosophy of ancient Greece. The personal is ephemeral, temporary, an unimportant characteristic that quickly disappears in death. It is the impersonal which is lasting and of paramount importance. This kind of thinking is simply a form of mental masochism which defies much of what we know and more importantly, defies our common sense.

Yours, as always,

Bar-Abbas

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